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I have an organ-synth CD by the late Rudy Rosa - one cut was either very well miced or mixed directly. There's no way a little fullrange speaker would play it well. I have a tragic looking Karlson 12 copy with 12 sq.in. port, Pyle PYM1298 12" woofer topped with compression driver and "K-tube" - although that little cabinet rolls off in half-space below ~70Hz, it really grabs dynamically - my Klipschorn does almost as well and of course, goes an octave lower (which affects perception too)
a flamenco guitar performance or even a drum battle - recorded to give an impression of being on stage, with room ambiance and at some subjectively "long" distance to the listener will be less demanding on a system than something closed miced and intended to sound like its right in the living room with full dynamics.
I have a Dan Weiss "Tintal" CD - Indian tabla pieces played on a regular drumkit and for the drone, a Stratocaster instead of a harmonium. I can't imagine that playing well on a little speaker, including typical small 3-way, and those "FAST" assisted fullrange. Too many dynamics drum strikes are happening too fast.
- does any of this make any sense ? - LOL
(a 3" driver is a headphone driver)
Karlson Evangelist
Follow Ups:
"- does any of this make any sense ? - LOL
(a 3" driver is a headphone driver)
Karlson Evangelist"
Fred,
All a matter of the inverse distance law, most small speakers do not have the SPL capability of larger speakers, so to get a sense of a live performance in your living room, you need to move the lesser SPL speakers an appropriate distance closer.
It's easy, for every 6 db less output, you move the speaker half as far a way, until they are located so close to your head that you can't move it without gross imaging "fail", or poking your eye out on the corner :^) .
Art
Even with SPLs within their capability the small speaKer is working so hard, is so much closer to its limits, that the stress is easily heard. Dynamics even at lower levels (80db) are lower, distortion is higher, the amp is working harder, it all adds up.
Progress in the speaker industry has essentially meant smaller packages, with a huge tradeoff of ease, naturalness, real life dynamics, distortion (manifested as a more stressed, harsher sound).
You can't beat the physics, there is no free lunch, these are expressions heard frequently within technical staffs in high tech, defense, aerospace. They apply just the same to audio.
But how did we get here, folks might ask? Marketing, magazines, wife acceptance factor, among other factors.
Acoustic impedance match of speaker diaphragm to the air it connects with probably plays a part.
See 1st para, here:
The horn is the acoustic transformer.
The compression driver is a very efficient and low distortion motor to create the wave that the horn then matches the impedance to a better degree than a direct radiator driver.
Freddy
The first time I saw this effect discussed was in Sound Practices where Herb Reichert was describing the difference between direct radiator speakers compared to horns as the difference between "you are there" and "they (the performers) are here".
I don't have any of the recordings you mention here, but a favorite for extreme dynamic range demos is Jean Guillou's pipe organ recording of Pictures at an Exhibition on Dorian CD from the 90's. My wife loved it. She commandeered my copy to her work, so another "home copy" had to be obtained, and she also requested a cassette version for the car too. When I made the cassette I was careful to adjust the levels to one of the louder passages. In the car the cassette was pretty much unlistenable, because if you turned up the quieter parts so you could hear them over the road noise, the louder parts would then push the dinky Sparkomatic amp into hard distortion! Seems kinda funny now though. I still have that tape, I should try it on the 500 Watt Monsoon in my Camaro, but I think the results won't be all that much better. My big horn rig at home with 30 Watts has no problem with it.
Another favorite is the soundtrack from The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen on vinyl. Some years ago I did some stuff to my Ampex 402 preamp and played this record as a first test. There are orchestral sections plus other sections with solo instruments close mic'd, and it's all mixed together amazingly well. The solo instruments sounded amazingly life like after the mods, like the instruments were right there in the room! However all the other recordings I played sounded terrible, very screechy! I later found out that I had inadvertently broken the rudimentary "loudness" cap off the volume pot. This is not switchable on this preamp and the phono RIAA filter was engineered with it in place. The audiophile term "revealing" comes to mind, and what this frequently reveals is there is a peak in the treble somewhere, and this peak was a whopper! It's odd that this recording still sounds good with a treble peak that makes most everything else sound screechy. Other recordings by the same composer sound good, but are not as outstanding as the Munchausen, and I often wondered what equipment they used. The CD and cassette versions have become collectible last I heard, but the vinyl is still reasonably available.
"It's a rocky road to Dublin": The Chieftains
but "...lots of fun at Finnigan's Wake": James Joyce
Paul
Little speakers won't put the performers in your room. They do what little speakers were designed for: to make speakers smaller than they were in the great heyday of American speakers, to not dominate the room decor, to please the wife a bit more (come on, little ones bother them too....).
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